Jean Arp
[Artist, b. 1886, Strasbourg, Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine, d. 1966, Basel, Switzerland.]

 the earth is not a fresh air resort and the idyllic prospectuses of the earth tell lies. nature does not run along the little thread on which reason would like to see it run. the light of day is beautiful but poisonous... 

Ingrid Sischy
[Editor and writer, b. 1952, Johannesburg, South Africa, d. 2015, New York.]

 ... we, today’s audience, know that pictures can “lie,” and like the photographers themselves, we assume that magazines can use pictures to slant things. Meaningful photojournalism today requires an appetite for challenge, a belief in the power of the medium, and an internal alarm system against stereotyping. 

Giséle Freund
[Photographer, b. 1908, Berlin, Germany, d. 2000, Paris, France.]

 The lens, that allegedly impartial eye, permits all possible distortions of reality... The importance of photography lies not only in the fact that it is a creation, but above all in the fact that it is one of the most effective means of shaping our ideas and influencing our behavior. 

Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]

 There is a kind of photography that has a refined presence in the history of images stolen from reality. It is the art photograph as a lie. It transcends fluid reality and creates a closed unity. When it achieves an aesthetic synthesis, it immediately attains static unity. Cartier-Bresson’s photographs taken in Indonesia, for example, have this paralysing effect. One is compelled to believe in the perfection of the original reality; the image is a harmonious entity in itself. “Do not change a single thing!” one feels inclined to exclaim, like a stupid tourist in any “exotic and primitive” country. 

Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
[Writer, b. 1885, Rungsted, Denmark, d. 1962, Rungsted, Denmark.]

 Your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet, ... into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and appears to be, in some way, the truth about you. Even a flattering picture is... a lie. 

Les Krims
[Photographer, b. 1943, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Buffalo, New York.]

 It is possible to create any picture a person imagines. 

Susan Meiselas
[Photographer, b. 1948, Baltimore, Maryland, lives in New York.]

 It’s difficult now to feel that I can’t make an image to bring the devastation of the war with the contras home, even though I feel a tremendous urgency all the time to do so... It’s not that there haven’t been images made, but the larger sense of an “image” has been defined elsewhere—in Washington, and in the press, by the powers that be. I can’t, we can’t, somehow, reframe it. 

George Bernard Shaw
[Writer, critic, and dramatist, b. 1856, Dublin, d. 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.]

 ... the eyes of artist had been so long educated to accept the most grossly fictitious conventions as truths of representation that many of the truths of the focusing-screen were at first repudiated as grotesque falsehoods. (1901) 
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